Posts Tagged ‘New York City’

(The Guardian) The New York City police department is facing a federal class action lawsuit over the expansion of its controversial stop-and-frisk program into residential buildings largely populated by African Americans and Latinos.

On Wednesday the New York Civil Liberties Union, LatinoJustice PRLDEF and The Bronx Defenders set their sights on Operation Clean Halls, an element of the department's stop-and-frisk program that allows police officers to conduct patrols inside thousands of residential buildings throughout the city.

Filed on behalf of 13 black and Latino New Yorkers and a class of similarly situated individuals, the suit accuses the NYPD of systematically violating the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. The suit is the third major legal challenge to the department's stop-and-frisk program in the last five years.

(Washington Post) America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

As the Lunar New Year begins Monday, annual festivities in Washington, D.C.’s shriveled Chinatown are, for the first time, being promoted by a large marketing firm. New York’s Chinatown, one of the nation’s oldest, has lost its status as home to the city’s largest Chinese population, based on the 2010 census.

(Huffington Post) New York City will spend $127 million in public and private funds on programs designed to help young black and Latino men.

Billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg will kick in $30 million from his foundation and hedge fund manager George Soros will match that amount, according to the mayor's office. The remaining $67.5 million will be paid by the city.

The Young Men's Initiative was first reported by The New York Times on Wednesday. The mayor's office called it the nation's "boldest and most comprehensive effort to tackle the broad disparities slowing the advancement of black and Latino young men" in a statement.

It will include job placement, fatherhood classes and training for probation officers and school staff on how to help the young men get ahead. More than a dozen city agencies will be involved.

The program will target about 315,000 black and Latino men between the ages of 16 and 24.

(NY1) The New York City Fire Department today unveiled a new print and radio ad campaign as it prepares to take on a new class of firefighters for the first time in years.

The department is looking to get a lot of people interested in taking the firefighter entrance exam, tentatively scheduled for January.

More than $1 million will be spent on advertising the test.

Speaking at Engine 37/Ladder 40 in Harlem, Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano said being a firefighter is the greatest job in the world.

"In the first year an FDNY firefighter will earn about $40,000. That's just the start. And that salary can increase to up to $100,00 in five year. Let me repeat that, up to $100,000 in five years. You get excellent health benefits and medical benefits for you and your family, and you enjoy those medical benefits for the rest of your life," Cassano said.

The FDNY has been unable to hire any firefighters since 2007 because a federal judge ruled the last three exams discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.

A new test is being worked on.

Of the more than 10,000 current firefighters only nine percent are black or Hispanic; one percent are Asian.

(Civilrights.org) A recent study by the Center for Constitutional Rights found that the New York City Police Department has been conducting its stop-question-and-frisk policy in a manner consistent with racial profiling.

The study examined police data regarding the 2.8 million stop-question-and-frisk stops that were logged from 2004 through 2009. This data includes only stops made at the discretion of an officer, not those based on radio requests. .

Nearly 200,000 (6.7 percent) of the stops were made without proper legal justification, and 24 percent of the police reports logged in five years lacked enough information to evaluate the legality of the stop.

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, the Columbia Law School professor who conducted the study, found that NYPD stops are significantly more frequent for Black and Hispanic citizens than for White citizens. His study also revealed that “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than Whites even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly White.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights supports an end to racial profiling based not only on its discriminatory nature but on the fact that it simply doesn’t work and wastes precious law enforcement resources.